Organic

Cindy Skrzycki in the Washington Post has a piece on organic dairying and the USDA regulations (basically requiring "organic" dairies to put their cows to pasture 30 percent of the year. That seems an easy requirement, we went from May to October in upstate NY.)

I found this bit to be revealing:

"Barbara Robinson, who oversees the National Organic Program at USDA, said the proposal is expansive because the agency wanted to lay out as many options as possible for the organic industry.

"We have no hidden agenda," she said, adding that she hopes a final rule will be published in the spring. "It's their rule, their industry and their marketing claim."

What's happening here is true of many programs--the government runs a program for and on behalf of a small group of people, those whose life is tied up with the program. After all, how many people really care whether the pasture requirement is 30 percent or 50 percent? The dairymen and a few organic activists. The rest of us will decide whether to buy milk labeled "organic" based on our evaluations (price, perceived health benefits, perceived animal care values, etc.). This dynamic, though, works across the board in government. It accounts for "earmarks" and lots of "waste" and "fraud", much of which is in the eye of the beholder. The ordinary citizen will perceive things to be waste which would astound the person who's "into" the program.

The Amish and Voting

Slate has a piece on the Amish and their voting, or non-voting. She doesn't mention that the Amish don't vote for their bishops, they choose them by lot. (Makes sense, if you believe that God's will rules everything, let Him choose the bishop. It's also egalitarian, which is also part of their ethos.)

Vote, If You Haven't Already

And after you vote, read how our forefathers (some of them) voted at this article,
including John Adams take on women voting and Ben Franklin's take on jackasses. Hat tip--Ancestry Weekly Journal.

Whoops, Mr. McKibben

Bill McKibben reviews Tom Friedman's new book in the New York Review of Books, finding it good but lacking in urgency. But these words, in the light of oil <$65 a barrel, look odd:

There's one other odd thing about this book—it's out of date even before it's published. Though Friedman follows some trends right up through the summer of 2008 (he has reports from June of this year about trends in Egyptian television, for instance), he doesn't even mention the largest story of the year, and indeed the dominant new trendline of our time: the sharply rising cost of oil. Though recently off its peaks, the price of oil has risen fast enough to dramatically change the way Americans behave, and indeed how we think about the world.

Ike, Roads, Archives, and My Grandparents

The National Archives has an RSS feed of a daily document from their files. (Three days ago it was a photo of John and Caroline Kennedy visiting their father in the Oval Office. ) Today it is this:

Dated November 3, 1919, this is Lt. Col. Dwight D. Eisenhower’s report on the Transcontinental Motor Convoy. Setting out from Washington, DC, on July 7, 1919, the Convoy was a test by the U.S. War Department to see if the country’s roads could handle long-distance movements of mechanized army units. Eisenhower’s experience during the expedition would later play a role in his support of the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act of 1956 while President.

Ike apparently found the roads to be terrible. I was struck by this, because some letters of my grandparents to my aunt (then a missionary in China) reported on their travels from Minneapolis to upstate New York (my father's farm) and back. They drove, ministers then being somewhat higher on the socio-economic order than mainstream Protestants are today, they owned a car. And they preferred it to taking the train, so it couldn't have been too bad. Of course, in those days civilization, as represented by the cities in the American and National baseball leagues, was north of the Mason-Dixon line and east of the Mississippi. And the roads connected civilization--once Ike got into the Plains states, it was a tough slog.

Identifying Voters, Taxpayers, and Patients

There's a sudden spurt of interest in going to a national voter-registration system. See Kevin Drum, Matt Yglesias, and Reihan Salam.

So it's time for me to renew my plea to do away with Social Security numbers. Implement a system that identifies eligible voters, potential patients (based on the recent RAND study) and taxpayers but at the same time phases out the use of SSN's. I'm convinced we could come up with a system that increases the safeguards for each person's privacy, gives people much more control over how their data is used and to whom it is available, and improves efficiency.

The key model is the virtual credit card number, not the one you're used to using but the one VISA offers which few people use. Most people give merchants their credit card number, which can be risky. But you can choose to have VISA provide a number that works only for the transaction, or the vendor. See this. Adapt the same principle and you can have a government-validated identification number for each employer-employee relationship, each patient-healthcare provider relationship, and each voter-voting district relationship; each different, each safeguarded, and none requiring an SSN.

Seems to me if you point out to reasonable people that they already have a unique identifier (their email address) and we get rid of the SSN it's a reasonable deal.

Next Secretary of Agriculture, Take Two

This Politico article mentions Gov. Vilsack and Rep. Collin Peterson as possible Obama Secretaries. I must say, I don't see a whole lot of diversity in the potential officials, but Obama hasn't, like Clinton, promised a Cabinet that looks like America.

Apples and Rocks

Many years ago when I was maybe 8 or 10 one fall evening I formed a temporary alliance with another neighborhood kid against two other kids (which represented the total number of kids within 2-3 years of me in the neighborhood). There was a creek running down the hill, with a field on one side and houses on the other side. There were one or more apple trees near the houses, and a handful of trees bordering the edge of the field. So our conflict escalated from name calling to throwing fallen apples back and forth at each other. Mostly you can dodge an apple, and if you get hit, it's not all that bad. Of coure, the problem comes when you run out of apples on the ground handy to throw. Then you have to run back to retrieve apples from further away, then dash forward to throw them, and repeat the process. It's easy in the adrenaline rush to move from fallen apples farther away to stones right handy on the ground. So soon we were tossing stones.

Don't remember how it ended, no big damage done. And none of us was ever elected President of the United States.

The Problems of the Athlete

Who to support for President? "We're coming from Democratic backgrounds, but we got Republican money right now." Fred Smoot from a Post article

Obama Channels Pollan

:-( See this story in the Des Moines Register. Hat tip: Brownfield Networks.